Census

Tonight, while doing a little Twitter reading, I saw Thomas post that Ancestry has put the NY State Census indexes online for 1892, 1915, and 1925.

Excitedly, I quickly hopped over to the Ancestry site to search 1925 for I expected to be able to find my great-grandparents – Lewis & Lucinda (Lennon) Robinson. Sure enough, after doing a few variations in their name spellings I found them.

The handwriting is not the easiest to read, but it’s good enough. The family as they *should* have been enumerated are Lewis, his wife Lucinda, and their kids Ethel, John, James, Frank, George, Andrew, and Isaac. New to me is the listing of Lewis’s brother William! William is also a Longshoreman.

I’m not sure why Ethel has an “E” for middle initial for her middle name was May. And, I’m not sure why John has Lewis instead of Robinson for last name? My grandfather, Herman, is not yet born here – he came along in 1926. 🙂 I knew already that Lewis was a longshoreman so it’s interesting to see his brother was also.

Additionally, before today, I had as Lewis’ parents, a William Robinson and wife Rebecca Toon based on his death certificate. I also found Lewis as a son to William & Rebecca in the 1900 census. Lewis’s brother William is younger than he, so is not in the 1900 family group, but now I need to go look for William & Rebecca in 1910 to see if William Jr. is listed. But, this 1925 census record having a William listed as a brother goes along with the family structure so far.

Last week, soon after the release of the index for Delaware on the Ancestry.com website, I received my first green shaky leaf hint from the 1940 census!

The hint was for a person in my McNair family tree, Ms. Carrie Lucille McNair Griffin (1919-2004). Carrie was a granddaughter of our family patriarch, Rufus Tannahill McNair, and from Plymouth, NC – the homebase of the McNair family. Before I received this hint, I did know Carrie lived in Delaware as this is where she was living when she passed.

As I reviewed my notes, I saw that I had Carrie in the 1920 census, but I don’t have her in 1930. Well, now, I have her in 1940 so I’ll have to go back and look for her.

In 1940, she is living in Wilmington, Delaware, with her mom Annie Registers McNair and siblings Ellen, Gertie May, Vance, Leon, Anna Mae, & Charles. The 1935 residence columns indicate they’d lived in the area in 1935. Ellen worked as a nursemaid and Carrie as a bookkeeper in an accounting office.

Yesterday I posted about my experiences with the first day of the census and I mentioned that I had no plans to seek out my family members while the images are still unindexed. Yeah – that didn’t hold out very long.

Last night I downloaded a few ED sets from theNARA websitearound the Craven & Lenoir counties in North Carolina. My father’s family is from there so I was curious to see who I would see. I didn’t plan to search for anyone specifically, but rather to browse.

She is living in ED 25-10, Craven County, sheet 8A. She is 7 years old, and thus, this is the first time she appears in the census. Her father William is 28, her mom Pearlie Mae is 27. Interestingly enough the family is enumerated as McLawhorn instead of their true name, Lawhorn. Cora is accompanied by brother William (age 9), brother John Wright (age 5) and brother Randolph (age 1). This is the first census for all the children, as William & Pearlie were married in 1931.

Enumerated above William & Pearlie is another interesting family. George & Roberta Tew. George was the brother of a man named Oscar Spears Tew. Oscar was the great-grandfather of someone I work with here at Vanderbilt. Last year, while doing some research on his family tree, I discovered this connection to my ancestral home area and based on other records had speculated that my family must have known the Tews. I had no idea they lived next to each other!

This has been a fun day! With the release of the 1940 census there has been a lot of excitement among many to see the records. Technical glitches abounded online as unexpected demand crashed the NARA website but there was still plenty to do.

What did I do? I made a half-hearted attempt to locate my paternal grandfather in Manhattan by browsing the New York records on Ancestry.com but gave that up after an hour. That was enough for me to realize I don’t even want to attempt to go through the census until it’s indexed; my family moved around too much. 🙂

I amcoordinating a group of indexers for FamilySearch for the TNGenWeb, so several of us spent the evening indexing. Currently, we have 30 members and as of this writing we have indexed over 3500 records (about 1,000 of them are census records). I myself only indexed two batches tonight so plan to do more tomorrow – I worked on Colorado. My favorite name of the evening wasPerfecto Chavis– he and his family lived in Pueblo County.

Then, after that, I did some indexing for another project – theNCGenWeb Yearbook Database. I started this about two years ago and tonight crossed the 30,000 threshold for the number of names indexed. Whoo hoo!